We have seen that towards the end of the thirteenth century the cristallai di cristallo di rocca fell foul of the glass-workers of Murano, and induced the authorities to forbid the imitation of their work in the inferior material. Not the least important of the productions of these workers in rock crystal and other hard stones were the beads for use in the rosaries (to use a word of later introduction)—the paternostri.
We know, too, that some such prohibition as that referred to was revoked in 1510; and the ground for this change of policy is found in the fact that for some time the Germans had been in the habit of carrying to their own country the ‘canes’[[136]] of glass, which they there cut and polished to form paternostri. These beads, re-imported into Venice, found their way ultimately to all parts of the world.
The Venetians, we must remember, at an early date, long before they had acquired territory on the mainland, had established factories at Treviso, at Belluno, and along the upper course of the river Piave. It is probable that advantage was taken of the abundant water-power to establish in these towns mills for the grinding and cutting of their glass. This industry, forbidden for a time at Murano, may have been carried on in a more or less clandestine manner.[[137]] It was through this country, too, that the German traders passed, and a link between the trans-Alpine and the Italian glass industries was thus early formed.
The starting-point in the manufacture of beads is a rod or cane of glass: according as this cane is hollow or solid, the manufacture is carried on by radically distinct methods.
In the case of the hollow cane or tube, we start from a ‘gathering’ at the end of the blowing-iron; this gathering is slightly inflated to form an incipient paraison, and a rod of iron is attached to the further extremity. This rod is seized by a boy—the tirador—who runs with it at full speed so as to elongate the glass as much as possible before it has time to cool; the thin tube, or canna, thus formed may, it is said, be as much as 150 feet in length. This tube, broken into rods of convenient lengths, then passes into the hands of another set of workmen, living for the most part in Venice. The rods are now carefully sorted, as to size, by women—the cernatrici—and handed over to the cutter, who, seated at a bench, cuts off equal lengths by passing the rod between a blade or chisel held in the hand, and a similar tool fixed in the bench, the size of the fragments being regulated by means of the scontro, a semi-cylindrical block of steel. If the object was to manufacture the little cylindrical bugles or jais, the bead—if so it may be called—is now completed. But in the case of a normal bead, the edges had now to be rounded. With this object the aperture of the little tubes had first to be filled with some infusible substance; this was done by rolling them in the hand with a finely ground mixture of lime and charcoal. They were now placed along with a quantity of sand in a tubular iron receptacle, which was rotated over the furnace.[[138]] By this means the angular edges were rounded off. The beads were then sifted from the sand and shaken up in a bag to remove the material with which the tubes had been plugged; finally they were sorted into various sizes by means of a sieve, and, in the case of spherical beads, those of irregular shape were eliminated by rolling them on an inclined table. It only remained for the lustratori to give them a final polish by shaking them up in a sack with bran.
This was the process adopted for the smaller beads—the conterie—which, before packing, were threaded on a string by girls. The larger perle, such as the perle a rosette, or chevron beads, of which I shall speak presently, had to be ground into shape on the wheel. Any ornament or design that appears on these beads depended of course upon the constitution of the original canna. This was often built up of a succession of layers of various colours, obtained by dipping the first gathering into one or more pots of coloured glass, before drawing it out to form a tube.
Beads made by this process belong strictly to the class of blown glass. The other system which we will now describe takes us back to the old primitive methods of glass-working. In this case we start from a solid rod of glass, which is manipulated in the hand of the workman somewhat like a stick of sealing-wax. Seated at a table, he melts the extremity of the canna in the flame, directed away from him by means of a blow-pipe, and twists the thread of viscid glass around a small rod of iron.[[139]] By this or similar methods, not only beads but various small objects of verroterie are formed. The surface of these may be subsequently decorated by means of appliqué studs and stringings of various coloured glass, or again, the half-fused substance may be pressed into little moulds. The spun-glass also, so much admired a few years since, is made from rods of glass melted in the flame of the table blow-pipe.
This is the process of the suppialume, in which the Venetian workmen acquired such skill in later days. It cannot be traced further back than the end of the fifteenth century, and its invention is associated with a certain Andrea Vidaore. The guild of the suppialumi was only finally constituted in 1648. If this process was really only introduced at so comparatively late a date, we have here a curious instance of a reversion to an old technique, for it is impossible to overlook the points of resemblance between it and the manner in which the ancient Egyptians built up their beads.[[140]]
It must be noted that the practical difference between the beads made by the suppialumi and those formed from hollow tubes, is not one of size. Large or small beads may be formed by either process. It is, rather, that in the first case the ornament is superficial—it is something added to the surface of the bead. On the other hand, in beads made from hollow tubes, the design, though limited in variety, is carried through the whole bead. This is a distinction much appreciated by native connoisseurs in Central Africa and elsewhere.
Among the beads made from hollow tubes there is one type, generally of commanding size, which may perhaps claim some attention. I refer to the great Chevron Beads, the Perle a rosette of the Italians, à propos of the origin and date of which a not insignificant literature has accumulated. I treat of them here, as in by far the larger number of instances, if not in all cases, these beads can be undoubtedly recognised as of Venetian manufacture. These chevron beads have been made from canes built up of concentric layers of coloured glass. They have attracted exceptional attention from the fact that examples have been found in so many widely separated parts of the world, and from their possessing, in some cases, apparently well founded claims to great age. The arrangement and the succession of the colours in the glass is in every case practically identical. The canes from which they were formed have been built up of three main concentric layers, externally a deep cobalt blue, then an opaque brick red, and in the centre a tube of pale green transparent glass; these main layers are divided by thinner ones of opaque white glass, and the dividing surfaces have been worked into a series of chevrons or zig-zags (these chevrons are in all cases, I think, twelve in number) so as to present a star-like pattern on a cross section. The only variations on this general type are as follows: the chevrons are, in a few cases, dragged laterally so as to resemble the teeth of a circular saw; the central tube of transparent glass is sometimes divided by a zig-zag layer of opaque white; and, very rarely, the external layer is green instead of blue. In shape and size, however, these chevron beads show wide divergences: in length they may vary from two and a half inches to as little as a third of an inch, and the diameter, though generally less, is in a few cases greater, than the length. The extremities in some of the larger and presumably older specimens are facetted, that is to say, ground down to a pyramidal form. What, however, we may call the normal type, is of a cylindrical shape with rounded ends ([Plate XV.] 2).